4

Tombs of Saints and Queens

According to the rather muddled and incomplete account of the events of 1485 given by the Crowland Chronicle, it was somewhere around the octave of Easter (Sunday 3 April–Sunday 10 April) that rumours of an impending rebellion reached the ears of the king.¹ The Crowland chronicler also reports that as early as the Feast of the Epiphany (6 January 1484/85) Richard had already received the news that an invasion on the part of his second cousin once removed, Henry ‘Tudor’, soi-disant ‘Earl of Richmond’, was likely to take place in 1485.²

On his mother’s side, this Henry ‘Tudor’ (the future King Henry VII) was a descendant in a legitimised (but originally bastard) line from John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. On his father’s side he happened also to be a nephew of Henry VI – although his descent from Henry VI’s mother had brought him no English royal blood whatsoever. It has also been suggested that Henry ‘Tudor’’s father, Edmund, was not really the son of Owen Tudor. Edmund ‘Tudor’’s real father may well have been Edmund Beaufort, first (second) Duke of Somerset, another of the legitimised Beaufort descendants of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster.³ If so, this descent might possibly have reinforced Henry Tudor’s claim to the Crown of England, though it would undermine his right to the surname Tudor (a surname, which, in practice, he and his descendants rarely used).

In point of fact, in putting forward his royal claim Henry never mentioned details of any of his real lines of descent. In 1484–85 his claim as advanced in France was founded upon the transparent lie that he was a younger son of the late Henry VI.⁴ Previously, Henry had tried another ploy. In 1483 he had sought unsuccessfully to advance a claim to the throne on the strength of a proposed future marriage with Elizabeth of York. Subsequently, he would claim the throne on the vaguely worded grounds of Lancastrian blood (with the details carefully left unspecified) coupled with the right of conquest. Interestingly, Henry VII was never to publicly proclaim his genuine but tenuous blood ties to the Plantagenet royal family. It was left to Richard III to attempt to explain those.

Far from being cowed and defeatist at the news of the forthcoming invasion, Richard was reportedly delighted. He believed that the coming of Henry ‘Tudor’ (as modern writers generally call him) against him would finally settle this matter, and that thereafter he would be able to reign in peace.⁵

It was doubtless in response to the latest intelligence regarding the threatened invasion (and the machinations of the King of France, which Richard certainly knew to lie behind it) that during the month of April a royal fleet was stationed in the Channel, under the command of Sir George Neville.⁶ Richard III had himself served as Admiral of England during the reign of his elder brother, and had enjoyed a long and close association with Sir John Howard (later Lord Howard, and ultimately Duke of Norfolk) who had held office under Richard as Admiral of the Northern Seas, and who, in the summer of 1483, had succeeded him as Admiral of England. One may therefore assert with some confidence that Richard possessed a clear notion of the importance of the navy to the defence of the realm. Indeed, previous writers have acknowledged that he took care to maintain and augment the navy left to him by Edward IV.⁷ Under its flagship, the carvel Edward, this fleet had been assiduously built up by the late king – a fact of which little account has hitherto been taken.⁸

However, Richard was embarrassed by a lack of ready money – a problem exacerbated by the fact that in the summer of 1483 Sir Edward Woodville had made off with a substantial portion of the royal treasury. King Richard himself had condemned in Parliament the so-called ‘benevolences’, or forced gifts, which his elder brother and preceding sovereigns had used as a form of taxation. Now, finding himself in a similar quandary to many of his predecessors, he was more or less compelled to adopt a not dissimilar solution. Instead of ‘benevolences’, however, he now introduced a system of forced loans. The difference between Richard’s expediency and the system of ‘benevolences’ was that Richard III now issued receipts for the money he obtained from his subjects, accompanied by an undertaking to repay it. Given his subsequent defeat, it is impossible to know whether or not the money would ultimately have been repaid. It is nevertheless clear that Richard was trying, for no one had even pretended that the earlier ‘benevolences’ would ever be paid back!

Although he had been at Windsor from 18–20 April, Richard III was in London on St George’s Day (23 April) 1485, and therefore did not attend the annual Garter Feast at St George’s Chapel in person. Instead, as we saw in the last chapter, ‘a commission under the privy seal, 22 April 1485, empowered lord Maltravers to keep the feast in the Sovereign’s absence’.⁹ This very late appointment of Maltravers (Richard III’s first cousin once removed on his mother’s side, and the son and heir of the Earl of Arundel) as the king’s deputy for the occasion suggests a rather hurried and last-minute change of plans. This may in some way have been connected with the execution of Sir Roger Clifford, for reasons unknown, on 2 May 1485.

On Thursday 12 May (the Feast of the Ascension) the king rode out of Westminster to return to Windsor Castle. He was never to see London or Westminster again. There may perhaps have been a particular reason why Richard III chose to return to Windsor Castle at this time. The anniversary of the death of the last Lancastrian king, Henry VI, was fast approaching. Henry VI was already popularly regarded as a saint and martyr, and the feast days of martyred saints are normally celebrated on the anniversaries of their deaths.

King Henry is usually said to have died, or been killed, on the night of 21 May 1471.¹⁰ This date is derived from John Warkworth’s account, which states that Henry ‘was putt to dethe the xxj day of Maij, on a tywesday night, betwyx xj and xij of the cloke’.¹¹ This date has, however, been questioned. Betram Wolffe, in his biography of Henry VI, suggested that the death may actually have occurred early on the morning of Wednesday 22 May,¹² and Vergil’s account, while giving no specific date, assigns Henry’s demise to the period after Edward IV had pacified Kent and dealt with Fauconberg, which would suggest very late May or possibly even early June.¹³ Sir Clements Markham ‘made use of the Exchequer Issue Rolls (detailing expenditure during Henry’s final days in residence in the Tower), to demonstrate that the deposed king was still alive up to 24 May at least’,¹⁴ though other writers have suggested that this merely represents a convenient date at which to end the accounting period. But the Arrival of Edward IV gives the date of Henry’s demise as Thursday ‘the xxiij day of the monithe of May’ and claims he died from natural causes.¹⁵ There is also the poem of Dafydd Llwyd of Mathafarn, apparently written shortly after Bosworth and rejoicing at the death of Richard III, which likewise implies that Thursday 23 May was the day on which Henry VI died.¹⁶ Therefore, although most modern accounts continue to state baldly that Henry died on 21 May, it is possible that the real date was slightly later. However, apart from drawing attention to that fact that divergent accounts exist, we need not dwell upon this point here, other than to observe that even in 1485 there may possibly have been some doubt as to the precise date of Henry VI’s death. Nevertheless, it must have been well known that he had died towards the end of May, and some date in that vicinity – possibly 21 May – had probably already begun to be thought of as representing ‘the Feast of St Henry VI’.

The saintly cult of Henry VI must have begun very soon after his demise, and certainly within a year or so of his death, for as early as 1473 ‘Richard Latoner was paid for his work in writing the testimonies of certain persons offering at the image of Henry VI in the Cathedral of York’.¹⁷ It may also have been at about the same time that the wild spinach plant, also known as ‘Mercury’, or ‘Poor Man’s Asparagus’ (Chenopodium bonus-henricus), acquired in England its now usual name of ‘Good King Henry’ – presumably in honour of the last Lancastrian monarch.¹⁸

Curiously, while later ages – on the basis of no evidence whatever – would see fit to impute Henry VI’s martyrdom to Richard himself,¹⁹ the reality is that if the last Lancastrian monarch had died from unnatural causes, it must have been King Edward IV who ordered his death. Indeed, his younger brother Richard may well have disapproved of this action, as he certainly did in the case of the subsequent execution of his own brother, the Duke of Clarence. At all events, Richard III seems to have regretted Henry VI’s death, and to have evinced a curious personal devotion to Henry’s cause as a putative saint. Thus it is an interesting fact that in 1484, Richard himself had ordered and paid for the translation of the remains of this erstwhile Lancastrian king and budding saint from the obscure grave at Chertsey Abbey, to which Edward IV had originally consigned them, to a royal tomb in St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, on the opposite side of the sanctuary from the burial site of Edward IV himself.

There may have been practical motives underlying Richard III’s action, and Griffiths, for one, considers that he ‘was wise to harness the dead king’s reputation rather than try to suppress it as his brother had done, in view of the growing popular veneration and the miracles associated with Henry’s name which are recorded from 1481’.²⁰ On the other hand, it is also perfectly possible that Richard’s decision is attributable to a genuinely religious motive. He was a sincerely religious man, and human beings are not invariably motivated solely by cynical self-interest, whatever historians may say.

The choice of the chapel royal at Windsor as the site for the new tomb may have been in part determined by practical considerations. The traditional royal burial area around the shrine of King St Edward the Confessor at Westminster Abbey was more or less full. King Henry VII would later find himself obliged to construct a large new Lady Chapel at the eastern end of the abbey to accommodate his own burial and that of Elizabeth of York. Richard III must have been well aware of the shortage of space at Westminster, since his brother, Edward IV, had been interred at Windsor, while Queen Anne Neville’s tomb at Westminster had been squeezed into a site in front of the sedilia, to the right of the high altar, where no funeral monument was possible other than a brass set into the pavement.

‘In the absence of known copies of Richard III’s will his intentions concerning his own burial remain unknown … [but] Richard may have shared Edward [IV]’s concept of the new foundation [of St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle] as the mausoleum of the Yorkist dynasty … The suggestion has been made that he had Henry [VI] interred in the second bay of the south choir aisle because he had reserved the first bay as his own place of burial.’²¹ The fact that Richard chose to bury Queen Anne Neville at Westminster rather than at Windsor is probably not significant. We have already seen that Richard was well aware of the fact that he would have to marry again and produce new heirs. If he did intend his own burial to be in St George’s Chapel, no doubt it would have been his second queen – the mother of the new Prince of Wales – who would have shared this tomb.

Henry VI’s new tomb, towards the east end of the south aisle, was sited – apparently quite deliberately – in a part of St George’s Chapel, which was already strongly associated with two other pilgrimage cults: those of the popularly canonised John Schorne (a Buckinghamshire parish priest whose supposedly miraculous remains were translated to St George’s Chapel in 1481) and of the Cross Gneth (the captured Welsh reliquary containing a fragment of the True Cross, which had been presented to the chapel by Edward III). Richard III had Henry VI’s new tomb created in the second bay of the south aisle of the choir, ‘and the whole of it was formerly decorated in his honour with colour and gilding, traces of which may still be seen’.²² The space beneath the archway was arranged as a chantry chapel, with the king’s tomb and a small altar, as described in the will of King Henry VIII.²³ It was therefore clearly a tomb, and not yet a saint’s shrine, to which Richard III transferred Henry VI’s remains. Nevertheless, there seems to be little reason to doubt that Richard III’s intention was to encourage the growth of Henry VI’s cult, and thereby attract additional funds to St George’s Chapel in the form of pilgrim offerings. The fifteenth-century offering box marked with a large ‘H’ which stands by the tomb was made by John Tresilian in the 1480s, and is quite possibly contemporary with the 1484 reburial.²⁴

Richard III’s reburial of Henry VI – curiously presaging the ultimate fate of Richard’s own remains – can be tentatively reconstructed by means of the evidence found when the Windsor tomb vault of 1484 was opened in 1910. Clearly, when the remains of Henry VI were exhumed from their tomb at Chertsey Abbey the body had already partly decayed.²⁵ The decomposed remains were therefore reverently collected. They were then wrapped in fabric as a small parcel, which was placed in a box made of a dark wood, 3 feet 3½ inches in length, 10 inches wide, and 9 inches deep. This wooden box was closed by a sliding top panel. The box was then sealed into a neat but plain lead casket, 3 feet 5 inches in length, 15 inches wide and 12 inches deep, the top of which was soldered into place so that it could not be opened without cutting the lead. The lead casket was in turn enclosed in a full-sized wooden coffin, surrounded by bands of iron.²⁶ The full-sized coffin was clearly a cosmetic feature. The intention was obviously that at the formal reburial it would appear to those present that an intact body reposed within.²⁷

The account roll for the treasurer of the College of Windsor for 1483–84 records expenses of £5 10s. 2d. incurred for the translation of the remains, and the fifteenth-century antiquary John Rous recorded that the exhumation from Chertsey Abbey took place in August 1484, and that the body was then transported to Windsor, where ‘it was honourably received and with very great solemnity buried again on the south part of the high altar’.²⁸ It is not impossible that Richard III had personally been present at the reburial, for he was certainly at Windsor Castle on Thursday 19 August 1484.²⁹ Subsequently, in May 1485 Richard may have wished to mark the coming anniversary of Henry’s death – the first since the previous year’s ‘translation’ of his remains to Windsor – by offering his own prayers at the new graveside in St George’s Chapel as the ‘feast day’ of this saint-by-acclamation approached.

The king was not, however, at St George’s Chapel for the actual anniversary of his predecessor’s putative martyrdom (whether that fell on 21 May or later). As we have already seen, on Tuesday 17 May he left Windsor and rode on to Berkhamsted Castle, where he visited his now semi-reclusive mother, Cecily Neville, Duchess of York. Two weeks earlier (Tuesday 3 May) Cecily had celebrated her seventieth birthday. Probably her son wanted to talk to her about his future remarriage with a Portuguese princess. Perhaps he also took the opportunity to discuss suitable arrangements for the future housing of his niece, Elizabeth, and her preparation for her forthcoming role as a Portuguese royal duchess. At all events, two or three weeks after seeing his mother Richard would make arrangements for Elizabeth, and possibly also her unmarried younger sisters, to join the Earls of Lincoln and Warwick at Sheriff Hutton Castle in Yorkshire.³⁰ Following the visit to Berkhamsted, Richard was not to meet his mother again. He took his leave of her on or about 20 May, when he rode north to the castle of Kenilworth.³¹

It was probably at about the end of May, or perhaps very early in June, either at Kenilworth Castle or in Coventry, that Richard III received a formal letter of condolence upon the death of Queen Anne Neville from the Doge and the Senate of the Most Serene Republic of Venice.³² The usual diplomatic wheels were turning at the somewhat slow rate enforced by the length of time it took, in the fifteenth century, for news to travel backwards and forwards between England and Italy.

In his letter on behalf of La Serenissima, penned on Monday 2 May, the Doge wrote in Latin:

a few days ago we received the sad news that Queen Anne, your beloved consort, had deceased. We, together with our Senate, mourn greatly, for we bear Your Majesty such love and good will that, as we rejoice at any prosperous event that befalls you, so we are partakers of your sorrows. We exhort Your Majesty, endowed with consummate equanimity and marvellous virtues, of your wisdom and grandeur of mind to bear the disaster calmly and resign yourself to the divine will; and be it Your Majesty’s consolation that your consort led so religious and catholic a life, and was so adorned with goodness, prudence and excellent morality as to leave a name immortal.³³

By this time it is probable that Queen Anne Neville’s funerary monument had been completed at Westminster Abbey. It comprised a slab of dark marble (perhaps Purbeck ‘marble’) let into the pavement on the south side of the nave altar, directly above the burial site. This slab was a matrix for a funeral brass which, had it survived, would have been unique: the only English brass monument to a queen. Unfortunately, ‘today all that remains of her tomb is a bluish-grey marble slab in the pavement … brass nails can still be found, showing that a “brass” marked [her] last resting place’.³⁴